It’s been a busy month of client work and springtime and trying to stay focused and active while the killers in high places say their prayers out loud. And at the end of this month, I come to you with an offering of words glowing on a screen. Let’s begin.
Online reading
First, Cat Hicks offers her theory of “Why I Cannot Be Technical”. This is a wonderful, challenging essay and I hope it is the first of many on her new blog, Fight for the Human. Hicks writes:
Your theory has to ask why, so your theory has to include repair. A description of the things happening for technical people and technical work has to include a realization of boundaries and how they are policed. This helps you start to see. Despite how real it feels, despite how carefully we have knit supposedly objective judgments of performance and evaluation and delivery of work into these words, Technical is not an assessment of reality. Labeling someone Technical is a reality-transforming weapon. I am structurally incapable of being Technical because in the world we have built, Technical must always be conditional for people like me, buffeted around by some unearned privileges and some undeserved exclusions as mediated by people’s perceptions and the current social location of my gender, class, race, ideological perspective, the role-related identities that the label put on my work gives me, and all of the other categories our brains are using to slice up this planet in between meteor strikes.
Cat Hicks
Earlier this month I had the good fortune to see Naomi Klein in conversation with Kate Starbird about her book Doppelganger—the most recent, and easily my favorite, of Klein’s books.
Klein did a huge service for a few hundred people gathered at a local university by merely saying that what is happening is not normal, and not OK. Everybody in attendance needed a moment to hear that, and feel it, in a crowd.
This event was only a few days after Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor wrote about the “darkly festive fatalism” currently dismantling the American state and what one can do—what we can do—in response:
To have a hope of combating the end times fascists, with their ever-constricting and asphyxiating concentric circles of ‘ordered love’, we will need to build an unruly open-hearted movement of the Earth-loving faithful: faithful to this planet, its people, its creatures and to the possibility of a livable future for us all. Faithful to here.
Naomi Klein
Moving from zero to one: how to…
Start consulting
Brea Starmer is the CEO of Lions & Tigers, a local/global consulting firm. She recently posted a remarkable six-point checklist for getting started in consulting. I truly wish I’d had this list in front of me when I began this work ~20 years ago. And as bad times are on horseback and people consider different ways of working, I’ve talked through this list with a couple folks. I think it’s a great starting point for those thinking about consulting, and specifically, how to begin.
Start writing
Liana has started up a blog where she’s sharing worthwhile advice from her work in/around writing. Now, Liana is my sweetheart and I linger over every word she publishes. Does that make me biased? Yes. Is this blog very good? Also, yes. Her first big post is about moving past fear and other self-inflicted obstacles. This will help anyone who’s ever stared into an empty page and despaired. Plus, if you read the piece, you’ll find out how the two of us met. Check it out:
Liana Kerr
Find insight in data
Donald Wheeler is a statistician, author, and consultant. I rely on his books “Understanding Variation” and “Understanding Statistical Process Control” for my own consulting work. I recently learned that Wheeler’s seminars are freely available online, with videos on YouTube. These are not flashy. But I encourage you to make time for the first two presentations, in which Wheeler makes his case that “the purpose of analysis is insight,” and demonstrates some basic, immediately useful methods.
Days like these
It’s hard to focus on anything right now. So much awful stuff is happening every day. It’s a challenge for me to treat each day and each breath as its own awesome thing, encountered whole-heartedly. Of course I fall short in this.
I hope that in memory this entire period feels like a montage—a compressed interval of political decay, massive unhinged cruelty, etc.—with a beginning and an end, set to some energetic yet gloomy song (perhaps New Order’s “Ceremony”). But we are not here in memory. We’re in the middle of things. So let’s keep at it.